Lucia Galloway
At the Center
I. Sculpture with Trees and Sparrows
Slabs of native bedrock shoulder up not far from
seated torsos’ columnar forms. Stands of timber
background massive structures’ coign and cant—
twenty Henry Moores matriculating for a season
in New York’s botanic garden, offering (it is asserted)
“an impressive interaction of nature and art.”
True, nature here’s no slovenly wilderness—not what
the poet noted when he saw the way a jar placed
on a hilltop could compose the carelessness
around it. Here nature cultivates its shadows
and perspectives. Landscapers are at work with
distance, the earth’s rotation, and the atmosphere’s
diffraction of its light. One artist talks to another
as I squeeze through the space between the piers
of one of Moore’s assertive bronzes to be dazzled
by a canvas of azure, umber, bister, moss, and leaf
framed by Moore’s passages and windows.
But where is the center from which the artist speaks?
Sometimes I want to turn from so much heft
to nimbleness—chipping sparrows skimming the grass
and shearing a shallow pool’s cellophane.
I see a flash of goldfinch in their midst—
that yellow bird—and make it make a picture,
no moment’s hesitation, no doubting that I can.
II. Indigo Bunting with Birders
That Indigo Bunting, satellite orbiting our field:
moments ago he’d been the indigo apotheosis
poised on a branch and captured, sunlit, in
our scope. Voyeurs and tricksters, we would fix upon
a way to lure him closer with a tape recording
of his territorial song. So now he circles us
to tell us off. Cinches our little group in a lariat
of scold: Spit-spit-spit-spit. And I can either smile
or twinge in ritual chagrin—cheap choices
in the face of such stern irony: what creature
does not know itself the center of the world?
The bunting’s unaware his plumes entirely lack
blue pigment, that light diffracted
through his feathers gives him that rich indigo.
But blue or black (and brown, I’m told, in winter)
he goes about it: mating and hunting as if the world
depended on it. His is a story that’s not a story—
motive only, without conceit. And we,
we’re left with theories of behavior and feather,
sentences outranking songs—
nothing, really, except conceit.
Bio
Lucia Galloway's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Dirty Napkin, Flyway, Gertrude, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The MacGuffin, Poemeleon, Red River Review, Redheaded Stepchild, Tilt-a-Whirl, and Untitled Country Review, among others. Her books are Venus and Other Losses (Plain View, 2010) and Playing Outside (Finishing Line, 2005). She received the Robert Haiduke Prize (1997) and earned Honorable Mention in the MacGuffin National Poet Hunt (2007), as well as Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. Currently, she co-hosts a poetry reading series in Claremont, California.